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The Dead BookVolume Two of a Trilogy

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The Archives San Francisco

THE D

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Hank Harrison

E DEAD

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Copyright © 1980, 1986, 1991 Hank Harrison

The Archives Press 334 State StreetLos Altos, California 94022

No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, orelectronic process, or in any magnetic, photographic or laser media, nor may itbe stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise copied for public or

private use without the written permission of the Author.

Flying Eyeball Illustration by Alton Kelley,Copyright © 1982 The Archives Press

Manufactured in the United States of America

Union MadeThis book is 100% recyclable

Library of Congress in Publication Data:Harrison, Hank (1940- )

The Dead (Volume II of a Trilogy)Urban Anthropology — Social Psychology

Cover Title: The Dead(Volume II of a Trilogy)

I. Title II. A Social History of the Haight Ashbury Experience

L Rock and Roll History2. Social History3. Music History

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 85-072167

International Standard Book Number:0-918501-12-1 Case Bound

0-918501 - 13-X Trade Paper

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This book represents Volume II of a trilogy which may span morethan three decades. Unlike all of the other books on the Haight-Ashburyrock scene it is written from an insider’s viewpoint, by someone whoobserved events first hand. None of the information in this book or theother volume is hearsay. This approach seems to outdistance its compe-tition. The Dead Book Trilogy was begun in 1970. It was the first bookever written exclusively about The Grateful Dead and yet it goes beyonda single band or a single event. All of the other books on the Haight–Ashbury experience are second generation Neo-Psychedelic pastiche.They are, for the most part, grossly sycophantic reshuffles. This trilogyis not intended to exploit the Grateful Dead or anyone else, it is merelyan attempt to convey iconography to future generations, for, if we reliedsolely on the newspaper versions, all of the efforts of thousands of peoplewould be lost and hundreds would have died in vain.

It is imperative that no one dismiss the rock movement of the ’60sand ’70s as insignificant simply because it did not address itself to thestatus quo, since it did address itself to the mainstream of the future.

After teaching in the public school system from 1976 to 1980, I wasconvinced that there may never be an insider’s account of what hap-pened in the Bay Area in sociological terms. Therefore 1 have providedsome framework with which future generations might better evaluateour struggle as we emerged as the fifth column of a sixth estate from ourSan Francisco bohemian roots.

It was clear that the media, as a fifth estate, and mom and pop justdidn’t want to comprehend the craziness of the movement or the commit-ments required. Even the European radicals had no idea what we wereup to, and the New York beatniks, still agog from the success of abstractexpressionism, Pop, Op, and Kirsch, thought it was very weird indeed.Hardly anyone, least of all ourselves, had any idea that we might actuallypull off this psychic coup de grace.

The rock groups of the Bay Area, the Loading Zone, the FlamingGroovies, the Mystery Trend, the Dead, the Beau Brummells, the FamilyDog-Avalon Family, Big Brother and Janis, Quicksilver, the Airplane–Starship, SVT, and Tuna and on and on into the night, even Ralph J.Gleason in his way, were the marching bands and conductors for a move-ment that swept the nation and the world in the most subtle wave ever to

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occur in modern history. We used lots of decoys and distractions, we posedas clowns, crazies, fools, and witties, scoundrels and troubadours, all toachieve our goal... which we never could quite define in words... just afeeling, really.

Others, such as Charles Reich and Theodore Rozak or Alvin Toffler,each posing as an apologist for their respective generations have vari-ously referred to the rock culture as “Consciousness Three” or “The Coun-terculture” or “The Third Wave,” but all of these approaches have beentaken by outsiders writing from decidedly outside views. For what it’sworth, I have written this trilogy from the only perspective I could havepossibly gained.

I would like to thank a number of people whose help was invaluablein the preparation of the book and the manuscript. Nancy Jeffers–Cummings of the Clark County Library, and Dr. and Mrs. John Standish,the Dead, Bill Brach, Spencer Dryden, Herb Greene, “Sweet” RichardHungeon, Marcie Ross, the Celestial Arts staff, Danny Moses of the Si-erra Club, Jay Moses, Jon Goodchild, Dame Frances Yates, John Michelle,Simon Vinkenoog, Lyn Ward, R.H. Blyth, John Dos Passos, Pig Pen’sMom and family, Pig Pen, Bob Petersen, T.C. and Sea, Philip Wylie, NelsonAlgren, Saul Alinsky, Herbert Marcuse, all of the people who subscribedto the Archives Newsletter, Henry Humble, Dead Heads everywhere,Henry Miller, Dr. Lloyd Saxton, Dr. Marilyn Buckley, Roshi Suzuki,Wendy and Jon Sievert, and Les and Toni Kippell of Relix magazine.

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Prelewd xi

Part One: Under the Dragon I

Under the Dragon 3Uncle Adolph 11Flashback 20Pachuco Hop 28Bevo Evo Devo 35Encountering Neal 46Toward Acid 5 ?Frater Phillipe 64T.C. 68Garcia 75Studio 79Pig Missing 89High Mass 98NotFadeAway 102Quicksilver I 0 7Altamont I 13Bear Tracks I 18Hip Sucks 126Airplane House 132New Buffalo 138Exit 141

Part Two: Sausalito Split 147

Sausalito Split 149Baba Rum Tim 155Mickey and the Hart Beats 162Deadpatch 16 7Sunshine Children 1 70King David 1 76Tassajara 185

CONTENTS

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Goldfinger 189Saint Francis the Conqueror 193Fast Cars and Slow Women 197In Praise of Groupies 199lack Straw 202Algonquin Journal 206Blind Spot 210The Nut in the Bank 219Free Money 221Dr. Feelgood 223Third Eye Patch 233Caduceus 23 7New Geology Hock Shop 240The Gnostics 248Rucka-Rucka 2.55Keith Strikes Out 263The Dead Movie 26 7Glass Camels 2 71Dopeless in Giza 2 75Fergusen’s Glory 287Daniel Martin 290Dead Levels 294Dead Heads 298Dead Heat for Last 303Dead Battery 306Dead End 308Appendix A: Discography313

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Sex, drugs, and revolutionary politics are commonplacein North American life, but rock and roll melted it all together...especially in San Francisco.

As soon as we Americans won independence from theBritish, we turned to fighting amongst ourselves and this wedo continually. Following the example of our internationalancestors, petty feuding has become a national pastime, themark of an advanced civilization.

The domestic conflict of the 1960s was not mere feud-ing: it became instead an all-out media battle paced by thesanguine war in Vietnam. Ours was a civic war fought at homewith fury and determination, but it was not a battle for turf,territory or booty; it was, rather, a battle for the survival ofideas.

War flags were hoisted, faces painted, tear gas filteredthrough sealed windows, young soldiers shot young students,white trash shot black popes and no one was untouched bythe conflict.

By the summer of 1967 the entire North American popu-lation had split into two ideological factions, the evolvingand the devolving, the sexual and the asexual, the drug andthe anti-drug... there was very little middle ground.

American democracy had polarized, federalist against capi-talist, brother against sister, mother against child, misfit againstconformist... those who advocated sex, drugs, and rock and rollfound themselves at the center of the controversy. Rock-and-rollmusic, a mosaic of almost all American thought forms, startedits slow transformation of future values.

The new music began to erode America’s puritanical ta-boos by “grossing out” the opposition. Sexual taboos imposedand promoted through media and family ties were clearly ar-chaic after the birth control pill took hold in the youth popu-lation. Almost everybody listened to rock and roll which was

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in the process of redefining and permissing a more humanis-tic lifestyle.

Rock and roll is loose music, erotic music, untutored mu-sic, but a mass of persistent moral taboos, some suicidal inthe face of modern stress, were stifling North America’s mostprecious commodity: Yankee ingenuity! Rock and roll seemedto be a seat-of-the-pants solution.

As a matter of course, rock sex, rock drugs, rock politics,and rock writing emerged as alternative creative and ritual-ized forms of expression, forbidden yet effective in copingwith stress.

An entire sub-rosa society, millions strong, began to callitself the Bock Culture. Gay, commie, misfit, pagan, brilliant,or burnt, everybody drifted to the new identity. The musicbecame a sub-carrier for elaborate metamessages, transmit-ting a dope code through alternative movies, FM radio, andrecorded media ... code-encode-decode.

In the latter third of the 20th century the Rock Cultureenjoyed an amazingly high impact level on the mainstreamculture. The music and its attendant art-as-science value sys-tem permeated every walk of life. Oriental and Western oc-cult traditions merged with Haitian voodoo, computer tech-nology, and electronic toys.

Back-to-earth ecology became the weird seed pod of thenew politik, dropouts started multimillion dollar enterprises,all accompanied by larger and larger doses of rock and roll.

San Francisco became the capital of the Rock Culture.

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The Dead BookVolume Two of a Trilogy

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Under the Dragon

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BOOK TWOPART ONE

UNDER THE DRAGON

1849 TO 1968

I think hip people leave small ghostsbehind for haunting of winter ballparksand locked bars that phantoms of oldtime hookers move between the flares,yet that no Phantom follows where asquare has gone.

NELSON ALGREN

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Under the Dragon

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UNDER THE DRAGON

The flag of the Flying Eyeball waves on the redwood pole inthe Eagle Mall outside the Grateful Dead office in San Rafael,California. The motto “Don’t tread on me” flaps against a windthat rises from the underground, a people-running wind. TheFlying Eyeball is a triumphant Zen flag and the Jolly Roger ofthe rock-and-roll misfit pirate. The flag stands next to the Bearflag and the Skull and Roses flag and the Phoenix flag of theCity of San Francisco, and Old Glory.

Everywhere in summer’s angry ghetto, rock and roll isthe marching music. Every time things get worse, the musicgives joy, it’s a tradition, the rock-and-roll revolution.

At first, in the early ‘fifties, it was “Honey-Hush,” by JoeTurner and “Gee” by the Crows; and most of the records werestill 78s. But the radio stations had the list, the hot night mu-sic, cruisin’ hot-rod marching music... “Hearts made of stone,do-do-wah-do-do-wah-wah-wah... will never break, but thelove you have, you never should forsake “... the Charms,Nutmegs, early Fats Domino.

In 1954 or so, “Earth Angel” came in soft on the hot wind,designed for slow dancing. Rub-de-rub delta music was far awayfrom the middle-class ghetto and yet it filtered through in theguise of rock and roll. Glenn Miller was phasing out, the DaveBrubeck Quartet was on the horizon, and a revolution was start-ing. Hiding in secret bedrooms, “Two Silhouettes on the Shade,”“Cryin’ in the Chapel.”

Outside of the pubescent fantasy world—the world ofNoxzema and worry about body image—there were thegrown-ups ... all so gray and lost... victims of Eisenhower’sparamilitary socialism protecting their children from “nigger”music, since it had been long known that this form of musichad a debilitating effect... it degraded morals and led to mari-juana addiction, Reefer Madness. There had never been a more

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accurate misperception. The music did lead to degraded morals,marijuana and debauchery. Fortunately, that’s exactly what theworld needed in the mid–l950s—just what the doctor ordered—slightly less uprightness.

This new generation was gonna grow and bebop and sockhop and do the hully-gully all the way to the White House. Toachieve this end, rock and roll turned America into a huge urbanhigh school, for better or for worse. The music generated dissentbecause it filled that secondary school alienation with a hope thatwe would be different from our teachers and the other grown-ups... the somber grown-ups.

Our music was jazz, funk, blues, rock, and classical all rolledinto one, a fusion music that took twenty years to arrive at legiti-mation, and, yet, there was something lacking; we suffered froma shallowness the grown-ups couldn’t possibly have warned usabout, an anti-intellectualism of our own making. The songs wereshort and the lyrics—even the heavy lyrics—couldn’t record andanimate events quite so clearly as a book or a movie. The musicslowed down the revolution by providing unrealistic economicexpectations; you had to learn to read and be stoned and boogieat the same time to get the whole picture... many found it impos-sible; it was easier to get stoned and listen to a record in the dark,than sit on the john with a book.

In books, life grows animate, the words tick by, books arememory archives, written now for savor by later generations.And rock books seem already to have two layers of dust, passedover as a silly genre.

In 1965, a San Francisco rock-and-roll group took thename: The Grateful Dead. The name had a ring to it. It hadshock value and a showbusiness flair, but none of the group’sleaders or friends had any idea that the name would evoke animmense genie, a flying eyeball, an energy cloud that wouldlast for more than two decades. Over those two decades theGrateful Dead became the single most popular unknown rockgroup in the world—a group known to everyone who brokethe law but to almost no one on the straight side. The socialschism was very clear-cut and the Grateful Dead became asymbol of solidarity against the squares... a legend from amyth, they and the other San Francisco bands had inherited

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the Holy Grail of the 1950s, the hot rod music lived on.Their name grew shorter; from a title to a familiar name,

now they were... The Dead, everyman’s band en route toHeaven or Hell or the maze at Chartres.

The Dead and the other San Francisco bands of the 1960swere the first bands to do extensive live FM/AM simulcastingwith television and live quadraphonic broadcasts. The Dead ad-vanced recording technology and filed for patents on innovativerecording devices. They also developed a wall-of-sound publicaddress system that has never been surpassed; each seat in anyhall or any outside arena anywhere could be tuned for optimumacoustic accuracy. The Dead were one of the first to use ad-vanced microprocessors in the music production system and thefirst to admit taking massive amounts of LSD. They started as ablues band, survived the erroneous “Acid Rock” label, and wentbeyond that rubric to be heralded as a seminal source of newmusic. All of this went on while they simultaneously evolvedinto a huge tribal family and extended kinship group.

Like most of the northern California bands, the Dead de-veloped their own style and their own instruments. The Deadhad no single sound, but, rather, a continuing kaleidoscopeof sounds and musical expressions from tuneful to symphonic,from harmonic to atonal, and from silent to very very loudindeed.

The Dead, as a family, were also an accurate microcosmof the larger alternate culture around them, a subculture whichcontinued to develop on into the 1980s and beyond, a subcul-ture which eventually made everybody strive for individua-tion, misfits first... individuals later.

I remember meeting each of the musicians in the Dead atcritical points in their careers. Phil Lesh, the bass player, andI were roommates in 1960, and again from 1970-1973. Hewas always called “Professor.” We absorbed Nietzsche andidolized the nihilist samurai... the EastWest cowboy...Kurosawa’s samurai knight as portrayed by Toshiro Mifune,the Green Knight of Arthurian legend.

I met Jerry Garcia in San Carlos at the Book Stall and atKepler’s Bookstore down in Menlo Park back in 1961. Most ofus were smoking grass in those days and the police hated it.

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Garcia banjoed and sang bluegrass and folk songs with anautoharp wizard named Marshall Leicher from Yale, and withBob Hunter who wrote most of the Grateful Dead lyrics. Garciawas seeking some pure dimension, but always a show businessdimension, too, cynical, funny, serious.

, Pig Pen was like Stevie Wonder. He had all of his skillwhen he was about eight years old. He just never improvedvery much. Pig Pen—Ron MeKernan—was about sixteenwhen he started playing folk blues with Ellen Cavanaugh,Rod Albin and Peter Albin in a put-together group called theSecond-Story Men.

Most of us went to school at the College of San Mateo at onetime or another, except Pig. He spent fourteen years listening tohis dad, who was, of all things, a rhythm-and-blues disc jockey.Pig cut his teeth on “Shake, Rattle, and Roll,” and went aroundsinging “Hi-o, hi-o, Silver, hi-o, hi-o, Silver, hi-o, hi-o, Silver,away!” in Joe Turner’s voice—he had it down to a perfect rep-lica, Clyde MePhatter, too.

On February 23, 1963, at the Tangent Club in downtownPalo Alto, I met Marty Balin, who later helped form theJefferson Airplane. He was in Palo Alto with a group calledthe Town Criers; the Wildwood Boys were playing on thesame card. The Wildwood Boys were Norm van Maastrict onbass, Dave Nelson on guitar, and—guess who—Jerry Garcia.

The Wildwood Boys were followed that night by EllenCavanaugh on autoharp, with Robert Hunter strumming along,as a duet, both of them singing folk tunes. Very little rock androll, except when Pig and Peter Albin played a duet ... then itgot snakey and bluesy.

I met Marshall Brickman and Paul Mittig and Willy Legate,all spiritual and antisocial movers, catalysts, anarchists, misfits,and nonconformists, and ran into lots of street people. We usedto go over and see Ronnie Schell and Lord Buckley, two hipcomics, at the Upstairs at the Downstairs above Zack’s Elec-tronics in Palo Alto. It was a college crowd.

I first met Tom Constantin, the composer, in Berkeleyabout 1962. Tom was an astronomy major at UC at the age of17. He and Phil were roommates in an apartment on Durantnext to a girls’ boarding apartment. Bobby “Pete” Petersen

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met his wife Jane in that apartment about the same time Garciawas terrorizing the feminine population of Palo Alto. I knewPetersen at San Mateo, too, as far back as 1959. The sceneshifted, but everybody kept in touch by mail or phone orthrough the grapevine.

By the time 1965 rolled around, Jerry Garcia had man-aged to talent scout the whole Bayside population lookingfor weird crazies who would help him fulfill Pig Pen’s fan-tasy, For years Pig had been after Garcia to put an electricblues band together, but it took Garcia a good long while tomerge out of the folk music space. He still had to master thebanjo, but he got excited about electric rock and roll after theStones and Dylan came on strong. Pig Pen was already writ-ing his own rock-and-roll songs. They were not Wagnerian,but they were real live songs.

Garcia was working at a music store in Palo Alto, DanaMorgan’s, teaching guitar. Dana Morgan was a fairly goodbass player, so Garcia got him and got Bill Kreutzmann, adrum instructor down there, and took Pig Pen out of his littleZodiacs band, and got Bob Weir, his best student, who wasalso teaching guitar himself, to form a proto-band.

Weir was still in high school, in fact, he was a hangnailsophomore. The school was in the process of getting rid ofhim. He was so bright and witty and his folks were rich, butBob was not really a good boy. He was an adoptee and, al-though happy, it seemed as if he was following a star otherthan the one Mom and Pop had picked out for him.

Garcia’s idea was to put this jam-band together just to seewhat new mischief they could cause. He got Phil Lesh inter-ested, Dana Morgan dropped out, and that’s about how it hap-pened, more or less—grain of salt and stoned and all ....

But the rock and roll thing wasn’t happening in a vacuum;it was happening in a social context. At first the revolutionwas the music. The symbols may have been dumb, but theywere ours. The Gulf of Tonkin had been invaded by theAmericans, without our permission, and nobody wanted thisgarbage music, but it caught Garcia’s eye. He says, “Here’s away to bug people.” “Maybe we’ll get a reaction with this one.”“People are flocking to San Francisco... it’s the ’60s, we’re good

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and belligerent now... Kennedy’s dead... OK, so let’s get a bandtogether. Let’s make it radical.” Pig Pen and Weir didn’t under-stand, Kreutzmann hesitated, but Phil Lesh understood the driftof it. Garcia had just gotten out of the Army, so he was the drillinstructor.

Phil has always been tall and skinny and white. Pig was shortand fat and hairy, and sort of off-white and off-color. Garcia wasa middleweight and swarthy. Muscleman Bill Kreutzmann hadto change his name to Summers to keep his dad’s name out of it,but that didn’t last, Weir was good lookin’ with a big brain and apeevish sense of humor. And this motley, this accidental, fortu-itous gaggle of weirds, with others who would come on boardlater, like Mickey Hart, the drumming Jew, and T.C. the gaunt,and Ned Lagin who balled his computer, and Keith and Donna,and Brent Mydland, and hundreds of others seen and unseen,were the Grateful Dead. In fact, everybody eventually joined upuntil there was no way to distinguish one San Francisco bandfrom another, or the audience from the bands, and at that pointsomeone said, “We are all The Dead’!”

More specifically, the Grateful Dead and the other SanFrancisco bands, the bands that identified electronic rock androll with San Francisco as much as dixieland was identifiedwith New Orleans and the blues with Chicago, have alwaysbeen charity bands, performing more benefits and free con-certs than any other subculture in history, generating millionsfor a revolution in values—the transformation. Yet, they havealways been outwardly neutral or at least politically cryptic.They have supported their own huge families, philosophies,and very large staffs for more than two decades, and havealways generated fanatic, ofttimes frenzied followers. Large,throbbing San Francisco rock and roll cults have existed inNew York, Amsterdam, Vancouver, San Francisco, Los An-geles, and Paris to say nothing of smaller towns everywhere;at least one “Dead-Freak-Hip Clique” (also known as “DeadHeads”) in every town. These people are not your averagerah-rahs.

The Grateful Dead themselves were also one of the mostimportant musical ensembles on the international level in theearly 1970s in that they were always an inspiration to other mu-

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sicians. The list is very long and includes Bob Dylan, Carol King,Joni Mitchell, the Blues Brothers, the Doobie Brothers, Crosby,Stills, Nash, and Young, and the Jefferson Airplane, to nameonly a few. They consistently produced gold albums withoutmajor AM airplay and without hitting the charts in a big way.But this mystery is not the entire basis for their human and cre-ative energy. As the bumper sticker says, “There ain’t nothin’quite like a Grateful Dead Concert.”

It was natural that rock and roll radicalism would erupt inand about San Francisco; because San Francisco was devoidof its own unique musical sound, has always been the mosttolerant of America’s large cities, has always accepted theunity of people, their diversity of religion or nonreligion, orant/religion, or their sexual preference, and has always some-how managed to thrive in an opalescent light. In a real sense,San Francisco is now identical to the Amsterdam of the fif-teenth century. (In the Renaissance, Amsterdam acted as abeacon for refugees of religious persecutions from France andGermany.) In other words, San Francisco was always a radi-cal town.

Going On the Road, hitchhiking like Jack Kerouac andNeal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg and many other restlessliterary hoboes, became a prime requisite in the undergroundscene, tile rock and roll village and the West Coast intellec-tual community. There just wasn’t anybody who really hadn’tgone bum again and again and again in the early ’60s, but asthe world became good ol’ nouveau riche and the moneyflowed forth from the golden road, well, then you didn’t haveto hitchhike. You didn’t have to freeze in a cornfield in Bee-bee Town, Iowa. (There is such a place and it’s scary to beout there at night with no bread and no gas.) Yet, somehowyou make it ....

This new generation, the post-War babies, just takes a jet.Neal Cassady’s jalopyidyllic road tour became an interna-tional Mercedes-Benz road tour, but it’s the same stoner wan-dering... pilgrimage. Homeless ecstasy. When the Dead Head,micro-bopper hordes started commuting across country to see aDead concert, none of us could really understand it. Why wouldanybody go all that way and spend two weeks’ salary or more

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just to see a Dead concert? But it got to be the thing to do. A tripto see a trip. Why not?

Now that I see the continuity in retrospect, it doesn’t seemtoo odd. It’s just that when you’re over 40, you see your beat-nik past in a display ease, whereas when you’re doing themicrodot polka in search of menarche, or the teenybopperquest for paradise, or going on the experience kick, you some-times lose perspective, your eyes get woolly, the edges dim.

One thing never faded: The old California value system

Peter Albin, 710 Ashbury, 1967 (Archives)

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with its generosity, its depth, and its intensity. It is a state-wide kind of social treaty wherein feelings are shared, openand healthy. There aren’t any private people in a state thatcould secede from the union... traditions are too indelible. Sogrowing up absurd in California has to be understood andaccepted in a western context. The vast civilization of theEast Coast is rational, dense, but the west is weird and shallalways be so. It’s a delightful absurdity, totally acceptable tonuts.

In keeping with the metaphysics of the Dadaists, the Grate-ful Dead might possibly be the most absurd, insolent, insolvent,and, yet, remarkable social phenomenon to rise from Californiain the twentieth century. Their remarkability, however, emanatesfrom a shadowy world, the world of illuminati and Grail seek-ers, the world of Hell’s Angels and dark-star rock. They are alsothe victims of their own mystique and have, in their lifetimes,seen a legend grow around them; a legend which occasionallysmothers them and insulates them from the more banal realitiesof life.

This book is a presentation of paradigms and mental mod-els that represent and symbolize the rock and roll communityat the closest possible level of intimacy, and is not directlyconcerned with the music or the public legend which has beenlargely formed from the dross outpourings of the mass me-dia. It is therefore a collection of artifacts and essays contrib-uting to the ongoing social dynamics of San Francisco, andthe consciousness of the “Alta” California underground.

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